Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Arles - travelogue - don't bet your life on posterity

He
didn’t know that it was a Santa Fe sky, say the sky of June 3, 1993,
same lowslung clouds, same flat earth, same encircling hills, same high
blue sky above the clouds, that he was seeing in that summer of 1888,
when he was bothered by the mistral and the rent and the need to
suppress his sexual instincts – the year he lived on half cooked
chickpeas and cheap alcohol – because Van Gogh never set eyes on New
Mexico. I however recognized it instantly, hanging there in the distance
outside the bus window as we swept by the acres of sun flowers and made
the turn into Arles from Tarascon, where we’d go off the train.

Arles it turns out was not the tourist mecca A. and I feared it might
be – seems they had all oiled off to the festival in Avignon – and we
settled in for our jaunt nicely after a small blowup at our hotel --
they tried to palm off a room to us that was deficient in the usual room
things – handles on doors, lampshades, and size, with the bathroom
competing with the bedroom in volume, which was not doing a favor to
either party. We achieved a more brilliant room, then we hied it to the
Place de Forum for lunch. I suggested to A, a little shamefacedly, that
we eat at the restaurant that claims to be the restaurant Van Gogh
painted at night (supposedly ornamenting his huge Cargmanole peasant hat
with little candles so he could see his canvas). Replete with poulpe
and nicoise salade, we then commenced a tour of Arles medievale, and the
river. Arles, like Santa Fe, hosts a lotta art in the summer –
everybody’s favorite stalker, Sophie Calle, had just been in town for an
expo – and it made a nice contrast between the old town’s winding,
narrow street, which crooked along like a map of the blind leading the
blind, and the affiches for past or present attractions which were glued
up all over the pressing walls. The weather was perfect Provence, the
kind that brings in flocks of retired British couples. They’d sneak up
behind us as we would read the carte outside of restaurants: Mum, ‘ere
it says they serve hommelette and frites! I wanted to try the taureau –
Arles is right proud of the running of its bulls, and has run them
through its cuisine as well, with local sauces and cuts. I liked it,
but, such is my feebleness and American decadence, I liked A.’s
entrecote de boeuf even more. The next day we used the ticket we’d
bought to gain entrance to all the sights on the ancien stuff – starting
with Allychamps, Champs Elysees, the street of sarcophagi, then on to
the Arene and the Thermes. A. said Arles was practically Italian. Bought
a book at Actes Sud, the bookstore/publisher, which has set up a
general emporium of culture (coffeehouse, exhibition place, cinema).
Then we lounged fashionably in a few squares, consuming beer, Perrier,
some green syrupy thing, a mystery novel, emails, and time – until we
had to move it to the railroad station and take the express train back
to Montpellier. We were sunburned, well fed, and pretty happy about our
one day jaunt/anniversary celebration. Van Gogh, of course, left
Arles under less happy circumstances. After the unfortunate ear act and
the shutting up in the hospital, fifty Arles citizens signed a petition
to the mayor to have him expelled, which depressed him a lot. Reading
his letters, it is easy to see what an impossible man he was, messianic
in that D.H. Lawrence manner – but I have a huge weakness for the
wrestlers with the chthonic soul, the underground men, those who fizz
like some malfactured cherry bomb, refusing either to explode or sputter
out, and thus dangerous to approach. If only, for his sake, he had sold
a few paintings in his lifetime! If only, for our sake, he had sold a
few less paintings, or at least for less money, in his afterlife! Those
guys at the fin de siecle counted a lot on the Nachwelt – on the future.
They staked their work on posthumous fame. But, as Karl Kraus once
wrote, do we, the living, really deserve to be a posterity? Kraus
doubted we were up to the task. I do too.

2 comments:

n the summer of 2002, my friend A. somehow convinced me to accompany her on an excursion with a little six year old girl, the daughter of friends. In the past few months, the girl had started having trouble at school, with any form of sociality. Her father, our friend, came from Pakistan.

That day, we walked through Central Park with the little girl and stopped as she stared at a fountain where kids were jumping in and splashing about and having fun. Why don't you join them we said and she shook her head. Amie picked her up and carried her into the fountain basin, both of them got soaked and the girl started laughing and talking to and laughing with the other kids.

What next? Amie suggested we go the nearby MET, and so we did, and I watched the people in the museum look at the two drenched gals with their clothes sticking to them rather than the famous paintings. We wandered about in the museum until we got to the room with the Van Gogh, where the little girl just stopped and stared. She didn't say anything for a long while, just stood and looked.

When she went back to school, she would draw and paint copies of the Van Gogh paintings she had seen and hand them to her classmates, the school friends she no longer knew how to speak to.

Emily, I love the story! And it makes me feel a bit like Daffy Duck in one of those sequences in which our hero shoots a rifle, which has been blocked, and blows it and himself up. My rifle was that fatal we in the last two sentences - which has the shapeless feel of some large body of water in which I am placidly paddling, and then it suddenly snaps into a more definite shape which includes the slickly wet kid trailing puddles and astonishment before the VvG's. Exactly, might I say, as van Gogh planned it - his paintings, he thought, were best understood on the simplest plane, even though they came out of a very complex encounter with all the art and life he knew.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.